While historians debate just when and why Detroit began to decline, it’s much easier to say what its high point was:

July 28, 1951. That was the official two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Detroit’s founding, and the city was at its peak.

Detroit had nearly two million people. It was rich, vibrant and strong. President Harry Truman came all the way from Washington to speak -- a rare occurrence then -- and the city then celebrated with a five-hour long parade. And there was other good news, too.

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra was being revived. Founded when the city had less than two hundred thousand people, it had been disbanded during the Great Depression. But now it was back, and on October 18th, it thrilled fans with its first concert.

Everybody knew then that to be a truly world-class city, you had to have a world-class symphony orchestra.

Back in the jazz age, Detroit had one of the nation’s best orchestras. They had been the first orchestra to have a concert broadcast on the radio. They were regulars at Carnegie Hall. And for eight years, they were broadcast regularly to a nationwide audience.

Then hard times came, and people forgot how important a symphony is for a while. Some people evidently lost sight of that again last year, when the symphony’s season was destroyed by a six-month long strike caused by money problems.

The symphony has huge debts, big deficits, and a shrinking donor base. Everyone agreed the musicians had to take a massive pay cut, but the question was, how massive?

While I am not an expert on cultural economics, it is clear that neither side did much to help their public image during the work stoppage, and management’s handling of public relations was especially bad, as one board member admitted to me.

The trick now is to not only bring the patrons back, but increase and enlarge the base. The orchestra now probably will be able to make a deal with the banks to whom it owes $54 million in real estate loans. But that’s a temporary solution. What the symphony really needs to do is convince the public to begin coming to their concerts and donating to keep this cultural resource. Anne Parsons, the president of the symphony, thinks the only way to do that is through community outreach. It’s hard to disagree. These days, three-quarters of the metropolitan area’s population and ninety percent of the money is outside the city limits.

My guess is that the symphony’s future involves realizing that the modern definition of Detroit is not the city limits, but the four million people who live in the metro area. They may also need to broaden their idea of programming. Purists may like to think that it is all about traditional classical music. But that music itself was avant-garde once upon a time. There’s an old saying that the railroads lost their way when they forgot that they were really in the transportation business, and couldn’t afford to be tied to a nostalgic model.

If the Detroit Symphony Orchestra takes that to heart, the odds will increase that it will revive, and hopefully, in the long-term, thrive.

Paul Willington is a classical music lover and a professionally trained cellist who, tragically, can no longer listen to music. That’s because he’s suffered the loss of most of his hearing.

He lives vicariously these days through his daughter Hailey, who grew up in the Birmingham area and is now studying violin at the Royal College of Music in London.

Willington tells me that while losing his hearing is sad, his real anguish is the long and seemingly unsolvable Detroit Symphony Orchestra strike. Not because he misses the music. Nor does he have any business or professional relationship with the DSO.

But he thinks that if Michigan manages to destroy its world-class symphony, it will have a huge, negative long-term economic impact on our ability to prosper.

“When Detroit Medical Center or Henry Ford goes hunting for the best and brightest surgeons, what are those candidates looking for in their decision-making process?”

“When they try to sell their spouse and kids on moving to Detroit, how do they sell the relocation to themselves and their family,” he asks. “Could the existence and proximity of world-class attractions,” like the Symphony, be a factor in their decisions?

Well, of course it might. Unfortunately the problem isn’t easy to solve. The management of the DSO maintains the money just isn’t there. They’ve insisted the musicians have to take a staggering pay cut of thirty percent. That would reduce their base salary from a little over a hundred thousand dollars a year to the mid-seventies. The musicians said no, and walked out. Now, it’s hard to accuse the artists of being greedy. They say they are willing to take a twenty-five percent pay cut, which would be hard enough for most families.

But they won’t go any lower than that. Since the strike began, everyone from Senator Carl Levin to Jennifer Granholm has attempted to solve it, so far without success. The musicians have stuck together and have been playing concerts on their own.

The big fear, however, is that the best of them may soon drift off and be snared by job offers from other cities.
Willington says he is frustrated that nobody seems to understand what a potential loss this would be for our state, or how hard a top-notch symphony would be to put together again if this one is destroyed. He argues that even those who couldn’t care less about music would suffer. Let’s say the area loses a top-notch heart surgeon because we lack cultural amenities.

The economics of the arts are not something this commentator is an expert on. But here’s something I do know. The Detroit baseball player Magglio Ordonez just took a massive pay cut.

He will now make only ten million dollars a year. That is equivalent to the salaries of a hundred DSO musicians before their pay cut took effect. True, most people might be more inclined to go to a ball game than a symphony.

But is one baseball player worth more than the entire orchestra? A man named Raymond Greene wrote a letter saying, “What I fail to comprehend is why a few of the multimillionaires who reside in the area are not coming forward to rescue this great institution.” That’s a question I’d like to ask, myself.